Unified Communications is the integration of real-time communication services, such as instant messaging, telephone, video conferencing, data sharing, and speech recognition, with non-real-time communication services, such as integrated voicemail, electronic mail (e-mail), text message (SMS), and facsimile. Unified Communications is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user-interface and user-experience across multiple devices and media-types. Unified Communications solutions aggregate multiple channels of communication into a single system, and provide access for a variety of clients. For example, a voice-mail may be transcribed and sent as a text message, an e-mail, or both. Simplified means of communication is resulting in an explosion of communication volume, and as such, people are spending a significant portion of their day reading and classifying communications for reference, action, or follow-up.
Classifying communications, such as e-mail, often involves a laborious task of creating and managing taxonomy for the messages and attachments, flagging messages for future searching, modifying expiration dates for important messages, purging irrelevant or unimportant messages, and looking through filtered messages to find potentially important messages mistakenly identified as spam.